As many of you in the BIM innovation community noticed, Stijn van Schaijk posted a huge amount of public available BIM data on github. Gigabytes of data including IFC data, BCF, pointclouds, schedules, log files, etc. are open available for R&D and educational purposes.

The bimvie.ws GUI has a new feature to automatically import the whole dataset into your BIMserver for demo and testing purposes.

Recents weeks we’ve been using the dataset to perform some optimisations on the usability of bimvie.ws and BIMserver. We’ve noticed that multiple aspect models didn’t perform as we expected and we updated the API of BIMserver to better facilitate this in the viewers.

Testing of the new setup with IfcOpenShell, bimvie.ws and BIMserver show remarkable performances. Loading the whole dataset with all 49 aspect models over a home internet connection fully loads within less than half a minute.

Testing on localhost shows the complete dataset in around 10 seconds which proves the limitation is in the internet connection.

We are excited about this and are looking even more forward to the new version of BIM Surfer. The BIM Surfer V2 is well on its way with a much leaner and stable API, an MIT license and much more features for improved usability.

We are stoked to see more and more open source tools of such high quality complementing each other. The activity on github, the release of the Schependomlaan and the growing use of BIMserver prove that BIM users are still seeking innovation. We are happy to contribute to that 🙂